Moodle assignment where student is automatically credited with an upload

Let’s say you want your students to upload a journal activity each week but you are not necessarily going to grade those items. They will get full-credit just for uploading. How do you do this in Moodle?

Moodle will NOT give automatic credit for just uploading a document but it WILL track who has uploaded something. It just won’t assign a grade to that. So you can create a work-around by making each of these assignments into two parts:

First you will create an ungraded assignment where the students actually do the uploads

Second you will create a one-question quiz where students affirm that they have done the proper upload

The key is that the second part (the quiz) is only visible when the first part (the assignment) has been done! We will use activity tracking for this.

Click on the ‘plus’ signs on the toggles below to see each step in this process.

Step 1 - turn on Completion Tracking for the course

To be able to use tracking on a course, you must first turn that on in your course. Go to the main course page and click on ‘edit settings’ in the administration block on the left.

Scroll down to where is says ‘Completion Tracking’ and choose ‘yes’ and then scroll to the bottom and click on the ‘save and display’ button.

Step 2 - create the assignment

Back on the main course page, turn editing on with the button in the upper-right side of the screen.

Then click on ‘add and activity or resource’ on the right and choose ‘assignment’ from the list of options that appears and then click the ‘add’ button.

On the Assignment Settings page that comes up next, name the assignment and then fill in the instructions for your students in the ‘description’ box. Tell them to upload their assignment here, tell them the due date, and then tell them that they must take a short 1-question quiz AFTER they upload their assignment to get credit for that assignment.

Further down on the settings page, choose any settings that you’d like. For instance, you can choose to have a due date and a cut-off date. The due date is when you want it due and a cut-off date is when they absolutely cannot submit it anymore. For some of you – those may be the same dates. (if you don’t allow late work).

Before you save this page, scroll down to where it says ‘Activity Completion’ and make sure to choose ‘show activity is complete when conditions are met’ and then check the box that says ‘student must submit activity to complete it’. Then click on ‘save and return to course’.

Step 3 - create the quiz

Back on the main course page, click on ‘add and activity or resource’ on the right and choose ‘quiz’ from the list of options that appears and then click the ‘add’ button.

On the Quiz Settings page that comes up next, name the quiz ‘affirmation of assignment’ (or something similar) and then write something in the description to the effect of “This quiz is a one-question quiz that you MUST take to get credit for your upload assignment. Click on the ‘begin quiz’ button below to begin.” See screenshot below (click to see it larger). Then scroll down a bit further.

In the timing settings, choose when you want this quiz to close. It should be AFTER the assignment that you created earlier closes. You don’t have to worry about when it opens.

The next part is where you link this quiz to the upload assignment that you created earlier. Scroll down to where it says ‘restrictions’ and open that toggle. Click on ‘add restriction’.

A box will pop up that asks you what type of restriction you want and you should choose ‘activity completion’.

Then it will ask you which activity in this course you want to be completed before this quiz can be attempted. Choose the assignment that you created earlier and then scroll down to the bottom and click on the ‘save and display’ button.

Now you need to add one question to this quiz. This question will just have the student affirm that they DID upload their assignment and then will get full-credit for saying ‘yes’. To add this question, click on ‘edit quiz’ button.

On the upper-right of the next page, click on the word ‘add’ and then choose ‘add a new question’.

Choose a true/false question type to add and name it ‘affirmation of upload assignment’. Give the students instructions to answer ‘true’ to this question.

Just below this, there is a box for ‘default mark’. You can choose how many points this assignment is worth here. There is a ‘1’ here but you can change it to ’10’ or ‘100’, etc.

Next make sure that ‘true’ is marked as the correct answer just below this.